A charming, luminous debut.
Two men shape lives of uncommon integrity.
In his radiant first novel, Irish musician Hession (aka Mumblin’ Deaf Ro) takes readers into the quiet, seemingly ordinary world of two unusual men, both in their 30s, both solitary by nature: Leonard, who writes entries for children’s encyclopedias, and Hungry Paul, a substitute postman, who works, when needed, on Mondays. Leonard lived with his mother, who has just died; Hungry Paul, with his parents, a retired economist and his cheerful wife, a primary school teacher, nearly retired herself. Although gossips may disparage an adult still living with parents as indolent, Hession portrays the men with respect and generosity. Hungry Paul “never left home because his family was a happy one, and maybe it’s rarer than it ought to be that a person appreciates such things.” The two appreciate their friendship as well: They play board games together, take walks, and confide in one another. Their friendship is a pact “to resist the vortex of busyness and insensitivity that had engulfed the rest of the world. It was a pact of simplicity, which stood against the forces of competitiveness and noise.” Of the two, Hungry Paul seems the more content, blessed with an inviolable “mental stillness” and “natural clarity” that inure him to troubling thoughts: “He just had no interest in, or capacity for, mental chatter.” Leonard is more inclined to second-guess himself and to conjure problems. He becomes afraid that withdrawing from the world might narrow his perspective, turn him “vinegary,” and make other people seem increasingly “unfathomable and perplexing.” He wants to open himself to experiences but worries that if Hungry Paul is content within his small universe, Leonard’s yearning to break out of his “own palpable milky loneliness” will threaten their friendship. The prospect of change propels the plot, prodding each man to articulate, with surprising self-awareness, the depths of his identity and to realize, as Hungry Paul reflects, that “making big decisions was just as consequential as not making them.” No one is “entirely outside of life’s choices; everything leads somewhere.”
A charming, luminous debut.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61219-848-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
PROFILES
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.
An ambitious scientific experiment wreaks horrendous toll in the Booker-winning British author’s disturbingly eloquent sixth novel (after When We Were Orphans, 2000).
Ishiguro’s narrator, identified only as Kath(y) H., speaks to us as a 31-year-old social worker of sorts, who’s completing her tenure as a “carer,” prior to becoming herself one of the “donors” whom she visits at various “recovery centers.” The setting is “England, late 1990s”—more than two decades after Kath was raised at a rural private school (Hailsham) whose students, all children of unspecified parentage, were sheltered, encouraged to develop their intellectual and especially artistic capabilities, and groomed to become donors. Visions of Brave New World and 1984 arise as Kath recalls in gradually and increasingly harrowing detail her friendships with fellow students Ruth and Tommy (the latter a sweet, though distractible boy prone to irrational temper tantrums), their “graduation” from Hailsham and years of comparative independence at a remote halfway house (the Cottages), the painful outcome of Ruth’s breakup with Tommy (whom Kath also loves), and the discovery the adult Kath and Tommy make when (while seeking a “deferral” from carer or donor status) they seek out Hailsham’s chastened “guardians” and receive confirmation of the limits long since placed on them. With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives—without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have “tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter.” That this stunningly brilliant fiction echoes Caryl Churchill’s superb play A Number and Margaret Atwood’s celebrated dystopian novels in no way diminishes its originality and power.
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.Pub Date: April 11, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4339-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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